wear away

English

Verb

wear away (third-person singular simple present wears away, present participle wearing away, simple past wore away, past participle worn away)

1. To erode gradually and progressively.
   • 1861, E. J. Guerin, Mountain Charley, page 17:

     As the sensitiveness which greeted my new position wore away, I began to rather like the freedom of my new character.

   • 1925-29, Mahadev Desai (translator), M.K. Gandhi, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Part I, chapter xvii^[1]:

     I stopped taking the sweets and condiments I had got from home. The mind having taken a different turn, the fondness for condiments wore away, and I now relished the boiled spinach which in Richmond tasted insipid, cooked without condiments. Many such experiments taught me that the real seat of taste was not the tongue but the mind.

Translations

erode gradually

• Finnish: hivuttaa
• Galician: rafar
• Italian: consumarsi (it)
• Japanese: (intransitive) 擦り減る (suriheru), (transitive) 擦り減らす (ja) (suriherasu)
• Latin: terō
• Romagnol: limêr (figurative)